Thread: Some hovertank screens

Well I have finally found some free time to work on my little hovertank project. Actually part of what motivated me to do that was reading Bubba's posts about putting a camera in the cockpit of something, so I went ahead and did just that.

I also changed my system/the physics so that the hovertank is a standalone entity. This allows me to pass inputs to it without the hovertank having to care about what is giving it the inputs (the inputs can be a player or they can be AI, or they can be scripted). Each time the Hovertank's physics is updated it checks the inputs and determines which thrusters are firing. There are currently 2 thrusters, one on starboard and port, which allows you to either move forward or backward, rotate in place, or rotate while moving forward/backward. After the thruster inputs are checked, the physics then goes ahead and evaluates the force/torque from the plenum chamber based on what it is hovering above.

I didn't release a binary for several reasons:
-I would have to manually find which textures are being used for the test map (which I am putting ramps and obstacles and such in there)
-The hovertank is really hard to control. I have not added any friction from the plenum chamber skirt (the big black thing you see underneath a hovercraft), therefore the vehicle drifts a lot. My goal is to kill a lot of the sideways movement and rotation by adding friction from the skirt: when you are going full speed the hovertank pumps as much air into the chamber as possible, lifting it up and reducing friction, when you are doing nothing it lets it down a bit, increasing friction.

The screens are of me crashing into another hovertank, a jump, and then me going up the jump (facing the sky, about to go over the edge)

Originally Posted by BobMcGee123

Release date: 4018

I bet it gets pushed back to 4019!

Looks great though

The post explains why there is no build released at the moment, Bob will get a build out eventually... I still bet on 4019 .

Looking hawt Bob, as always.
The project's coming along nicely too

I'll try to post something playable once I make the crafts easier to control, and Ive got a map that has a bunch of jumps and ramps and stuff.

that'll also help me look for problems, get suggestions on improvements/etc.

Looking forward to it dude.

Looks good Bob. So did you do what I suggested in my thread? And if so, was I right and does it work? I was talking in theory in my thread but it sounded good. We still have yet to try out our 3D cockpits because:

• Most editors do not allow you to look 'inside' of your models, hence you cannot make a canopy shaped bubble and then add items inside of it.
• We suck at drawing 3D cockpits.
• The functionality of the 3D cockpits is going to be next to nil which brings up a question of whether or not we even need them at all. - For more info check out sites on Freelancer, X3: Reunion and X2: The Threat. X3 dumped the cockpits altogether.
• Given that our poly limit per model is around 5500 tri's, a 3D virtual cockpit would push us over that limit rather quickly.
• We are not sure how to render the cockpits. Do we use brute force and just let the video card cull away the parts outside the frustum, or do we create a hierarchy for each cockpit?

There are several ways to render the cockpits and I'd like to know which one you are doing.

• Transform the cockpit model to world space just like any other object and render.
• Invert the view matrix, translate the cockpit to it's location relative to 0,0,0, and render.

The first method requires a complete transform pipeline to orient the cockpit to match the orientation of the ship.
The second method requires finding the inverse of the view transformation matrix.

So I guess the question would be....which method is more expensive?

Also, Bob, found a utility called Cube the Sphere which performs gnomonic projection on 6 textures so you can then use them on a skybox with no problems and no artifacts. It works great. You can google it or I can send it to ya's if you need it. It makes skybox texture creation a snap.

Uhm I thought I made a reply but evidently I didn't.

Basically, you're asking how I actually built the transformation matrix for centering around the cockpit, well, I just did what I could to build the inverse matrix for the hovertank's perspective. I'll just post the code that does the work

Code:

	Matrix4x4	rot,trans;
	Matrix3x3	invert = pTest_Hovertank->CurrentState.mMat_Orientation;
	invert.Invert();
	rot = invert;
	trans.SetTranslation(&((pTest_Hovertank->CurrentState.mPosition+Vector3(0,10,0))*-1));
	Matrix4x4	final	=	rot*trans;
	R_Replace4x4GLMatrix(final,GL_MODELVIEW);

As per rendering the cockpit, well, my models are low poly enough that I just render the whole thing and let GL take care of it (manually clipping away, as you said). However, if I was being real strict, I would render the cockpit (in object coordinates) from every possibible perspective and list the faces that get rendered. But, like I said, I don't do much with fancy graphics/shaders etc so rendering speed has never been an issue (the code runs at 100.0f FPS constantly, which is the target for the physics).

Yeah.